Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience

  Shane’s periods eventually started up again. But she then began to dream that she was in the field in her night robe, and that she was frightened of the UFO that hovered above her. In the dream a spotlight beam comes from the bottom of the ship, and she is floated up through a hole underneath.

  Not long before she went to see Holzer, she woke up late, and noticed that her neck and face seemed to be heavily sunburnt. Again, she felt as though she had been drugged.

  Holzer placed her under hypnosis, and Shane was able to recall the night in 1968 when she woke up with a feeling that someone was calling her name. ‘I see this light and I want to get up’.

  She sees the saucer, with a revolving rim, hanging above her, and she is ‘floated’ aboard. Then she is in a white room, and a small man wearing a kind of motorcycle jacket comes in. He asks her to lie on the table, and she refuses. He tells her to undress, then explains that he wants her to have a baby. She feels impelled to lie down. Then a long needle punctures her stomach.

  After that, some kind of jelly is rubbed on her body, and she feels sexually stimulated. Finally, the naked man lies on top of her and makes love to her. ‘I feel terrible . . . I am enjoying it’. Shane had been a virgin until then. Afterwards, she accuses the man of raping her, and he tells her she will forget it. She is dressed and floated down to the ground again.

  What happened to the pregnancy? Holzer never found out. Shane had nightmares that made her refuse to submit to further hypnosis, so the case remained incomplete. But, since her periods came back, the assumption—based on other cases—is that she was abducted again and the foetus removed.

  Ten years after Holzer’s hypnosis of Shane Kurz, Budd Hopkins encountered a case that was in many ways similar.

  After the publication of Missing Time in 1981, Hopkins was contacted by a woman named Kathie Davis (real name Debbie Tomey), who lived in Copley Woods, near Indianapolis. She sent him colour photographs, in which he immediately recognised typical signs of UFO landing—notably, a burnt circle of grass about eight feet in diameter. In July 1983, Kathie’s mother had seen a bright light that had moved over the lawn. The dog hid under the car. That night, the grass was burnt, and nothing would grow there.

  Kathie Davis also spoke of her sister Laura, who had felt a curious compulsion to drive into a car park, where she had seen ‘something silver’ hovering over a telegraph pole. Then, hours later, she found herself driving home in the dark.

  Ten years later, Laura went to a hypnotist to lose weight, and that night found she was deaf and dumb. Hopkins reasoned that the hypnosis had probably awakened the abduction experience that had taken place in the car park.

  Kathie herself had experienced missing time as a teenager, when she and two girlfriends had seen a UFO hovering over their car one night; the next thing she remembered was arriving home at dawn.

  Yet some of Kathie’s experiences make us aware that, in abduction experiences, it is often hard to separate reality and unreality. One night, she drove to an all-night food store to get a drink. When she returned, she realised that she had still not bought anything to drink. She turned and drove back, and saw some large, brightly lit object in the sky, which she took to be an advertising balloon. After this, she went into the store, but the man she saw there was not the assistant who usually served her, and she recognised that the store was not a store, but some kind of spacecraft. Later that night, Kathie believes she had an abduction experience, and that so did her mother. It seems clear that the ‘aliens’ have the power to blur the sense of reality and make it dreamlike.

  When Hopkins visited Kathie’s house in Copley Woods, she told him how, on the night the lawn had been scorched, she and two friends had been swimming in her pool when—in spite of the heat—they all became freezing cold. (This, again, begins to look like a recurrent symptom in abduction cases.) Kathie’s eyes started to hurt, and they all began to feel sick. Neighbours verified that some kind of bright light had landed on Kathie’s lawn, and had made the lights flicker and interfered with the television.

  When Kathie had been eighteen, she had found she was pregnant, and assumed that her boyfriend was responsible. A few months later, the pregnancy vanished—yet there were no signs of miscarriage.

  Placed under hypnosis, Kathie remembered how, when she was nineteen, she had awakened to find two small grey figures by her bed. She remembered being floated into a place where she was medically examined, while a probe was inserted up her nose, and broke through the skin of the sinuses.

  Her son Tommy also suffered a nosebleed, and the doctor who examined him found that his sinuses had been punctured. Hopkins had encountered many similar cases involving nosebleeds suffered by people who had had abduction experiences. He speculated that some sort of implant was some being inserted as a form of ‘tagging’.

  During a later hypnotic session, Kathie described how, during an abduction, she was allowed to see the child that had been removed from her womb; it was now a little blonde girl of about four, and she differed from a normal child only in that her head was slightly bigger than usual. . . . I felt like I just wanted to hold her. And I started crying’.

  For Hopkins, these events were coming together into a pattern, and that pattern indicated that aliens were abducting women and implanting foetuses in their wombs, which were later removed. In 1961, Betty Hill had described having a kind of long needle inserted into her stomach.

  At this time, there was no such needle in use in hospitals. But, ten years later, there was a device called a lamaroscope, a flexible tube containing fibre optics, which could be inserted into the patient’s navel for looking inside her, and for removing ova for fertilisation—so-called ‘test-tube babies’.

  Hopkins mentions other cases that support this notion. A girl called Andrea described how, when she was thirteen, she dreamt of having sex with a bald man with ‘funny eyes’, and woke up to find the bed was wet. In subsequent months her stomach began to swell, and the doctor told her she was pregnant. Yet she was a virgin, and her hymen was still unbroken. The problem was solved with an abortion.

  A girl called Susan described how, when she was sixteen, she had stopped her car to watch a light in the sky. She then experienced some telepathic communication with the UFO, and felt herself drawn up until she was lying on a table inside it. She was relaxed and unafraid, although she was naked from the waist down, and felt a probe inserted into her vagina. This experience, it seems, was simply an internal examination.

  She told Hopkins that, a year later, she had spoken to her boyfriend about the experience. Hopkins rang him to check, and the boyfriend could not recall it. But he could recall a UFO they had seen together at this time—and which she had totally forgotten. All of which suggests again that the ‘aliens’ are able to exercise some kind of hypnotic manipulation over humans.

  At this point, it is important to state that most modern books on hypnosis propagate a fallacy: that people cannot be hypnotised against their will. It is true that medical hypnosis depends on the cooperation of the patient with the doctor. But there are dozens of cases of people being hypnotised against their will—or at least without their cooperation.

  In a famous criminal case in Heidelberg in the mid-1930s, a swindler called Franz Walter travelled on a train with a young woman, and claimed to be a doctor who could treat her stomach pains. He asked her to come for a cup of coffee, but she was nervous and unwilling. But, as they stepped on the platform, he took her hand, and (she said), ‘It seemed to me I no longer had a will of my own’. He took her to his room, told her she was unable to move, then raped her. He then ordered her to forget what had happened. Later, he ordered her to become a prostitute. Walter taught the men to whom he sold her a ‘magic word’, which would make her do whatever they asked. He took all the money she earned. After she married, he ordered her to kill her husband. When she failed, he ordered her to kill herself. Fortunately, three suicide attempts were thwarted by chance. Finally, the husband became suspicious and went to the
police. And, after a long struggle, the police hypnotist succeeded in ‘unlocking’ the various inhibitions that Walter had implanted in her to prevent her remembering what had happened. Walter was sentenced to ten years in jail.

  What seems clear is that Walter had immediately recognised her as the kind of woman over whom he could exercise control; he merely had to touch her hand to deprive her of will.

  A case recorded in Robert Temple’s classic history of hypnosis, Open to Suggestion, makes the same point. In January 1985, a Portuguese woman in Notting Hill Gate was accosted by a Portuguese man who asked her the way. She was unable to help, and the man asked another passer-by, also Portuguese. This man introduced himself to her and took her hand. She immediately felt a dreamlike sense of unreality. She was then ordered to go home and bring her savings book, then to draw out all her savings—over £1,000—and give it to the two men, who went off with her money. The two swindlers were caught by chance, and proved to have swindled several other people by the same method. Both were sentenced to prison and deported.

  Temple demolishes the notion that people cannot be hypnotised against their will, and that people under hypnosis will not commit criminal acts that they would not commit in their normal state. He cites another woman who was assaulted by the hypnotist, and who said, ‘He started to caress my lower body . . . I just let that happen, did not feel like, nor had the power to say no. He asked me if I liked it. Although I did not like it, I said yes’. And she adds the important statement: ‘Only I did not have any fear which normally would have been there’.

  In 1991, a hypnotist named Nelson Lintott assaulted 113 girls under hypnosis, often videoing the sex. He claimed to be curing them of nail-biting or smoking. When shown these videos later, the girls were horrified—they had no memory of being undressed and raped.

  All of which makes clear that most skilled hypnotists have the powers attributed to aliens: can cause certain people to become ‘will-less’, to paralyse them, and to cause them to experience amnesia. In all probability, this does not apply to everybody; John Keel and Hans Holzer both suspect that ‘contactees’ may be chosen for certain reasons, including ‘psychic’ tendencies.

  The American doctor Howard Miller, who practised hypnosis, was convinced that it involves some form of telepathy, in which the will of the hypnotist influences the will of the patient. And Ferenc Volgyesi’s book Hypnosis of Men and Animals has many accounts of ‘battles of will’ between reptiles and animals—one photograph shows a battle of wills between a bird and a rattlesnake which ended in victory for the bird, while another shows a battle of wills between a toad and a cobra which ended in victory for the toad. So the notion that hypnosis is purely a matter of ‘suggestion’ is clearly in urgent need of revision.

  The psychologist Pierre Janet was able to summon one of his patients, ‘Lennie’, with whom he had established hypnotic rapport, from the other side of Le Havre. It is quite clear that ‘aliens’ have a similar power over people with whom they have established a rapport, so that they can be ‘summoned’ in the middle of the night, often hearing their name called ‘inside their heads’.

  It also seems possible that the sight of a UFO—with its revolving rim and flashing lights—may induce hypnosis. We have seen a number of cases where people have entered a trance after seeing a UFO.

  What most of us find so hard to understand is how ‘contactees’ can slip into a state that strikes us as totally irrational—like Kathie Davis when she was not sure whether she was in an all-night store or a UFO. This is as difficult to grasp as the idea of being hypnotised against our will. The philosopher James Mill believed it ought to be possible to argue madmen out of their madness, and so revealed that he suffered from a version of what Whitehead called ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. Mill obviously believed that sanity is a norm which is common to all of us, like our perception that one and one make two, and that it ought to be easy to persuade anyone who deviates from the norm to recognise that he or she is being unreasonable. This is like assuming that, because sight is normal, we ought to be able to reason a blind man into acknowledging that he is only shamming.

  In her book The Human Brain, Susan Greenfield points out that patients with damage to the parietal cortex often feel that parts of their body do not belong to them, and may even insist that their arm belongs to someone else. Oliver Sachs’s title The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hatstand again makes us aware that brain damage can make quite bizarre perceptions seem normal. The truth is that there is no ‘normal reality’ that we all share; there is simply a consensus reality, which is like the consensus morality or consensus religion or consensus politics that is taken for granted by some remote tribe—or by most civilised societies.

  The kind of scepticism we feel about contactees and abductees is a part of the consensus reality. But consensus reality changes. In 1950, only a tiny proportion of the population of Europe or the United States believed in the reality of UFOs; now the figure is more than 50 percent. The UFO phenomenon has changed this aspect of our consensus reality—which seems to be part of its aim.

  Of course, it would all be much easier if people who believe in the existence of UFOs could decide exactly what it is they believe in: solid metal spaceships from Sirius, semisolid craft from another dimension, or psychic vehicles from Ted Holiday’s goblin universe that should be classified with ghosts and poltergeists.

  To add to the confusion, the phenomenon itself seems determined to remain ambiguous, frustrating every attempt to reach definite conclusions. Every time someone arrives at a theory that sounds balanced and sensible, some contradictory new piece of evidence turns it on its head. Jacques Vallee, John Keel and John Michell spent years studying the phenomenon, and ended by feeling that it defies explanation. John Mack’s original reaction to Budd Hopkins’s claims about abductees was, ‘They must be mad, and so must he’. A more careful examination of the subject convinced him that nobody was mad: they were telling the truth insofar as they knew it. Yet, years after becoming involved in the study of abductees, John Mack admits that he is no more enlightened than he was after six months.

  Budd Hopkins is a good example of the nature of the problem. In Missing Time he concluded that abduction undoubtedly takes place, and that ‘they’ are able to induce amnesia. In Intruders he concluded that ‘they’ are involved in some biological experiment, probably breeding semihuman hybrids. But his next book, Witnessed (1996), not only fails to take the subject any further: it succeeds in making it sound too absurd to be taken seriously.

  Hopkins had already described the case of the woman he calls Linda Cortile at the MIT conference. There he began by saying, ‘This is the most important UFO abduction case that I’ve ever worked on. It concerns the abduction of a woman who recalled floating out of a twelfth-storey window in a downtown Manhattan building on November 30, 1989’.

  Linda Cortile had written to Hopkins seven months earlier, to say that his book Intruders had awakened fears that she was an abductee.

  In 1967, when she was twenty-three, she lay in bed and had the experience of feeling paralysis creep from her toes to her head. It happened several times. In 1969, she married, and went to see a doctor about a bump on her nose, which she feared might be a tumour. The doctor reassured her, but said she had a surgery scar inside her nose. She said she had never had surgery on her nose; he assured her she had. This is what led her to write to Hopkins.

  On the morning of 30 November 1989, she telephoned Hopkins to say that a small, grey-skinned alien had approached her bed in the early hours of the morning, and she had thrown a pillow at him. Then she had become paralysed. Two days later, under hypnosis, she described being taken to the window by three ‘greys’ and floated out to a UFO. There she was made to lie on a table, and she recalled speaking to them in their own language. One of them examined her nose, then ran his fingers through her hair with obvious tenderness, touched her cheek, and asked after her family. Soon after that she found herself back in her o
wn bed.

  Fourteen months later, Hopkins received a letter signed ‘Police Officers Dan and Richard’, which informed him that at 3:30 a.m. on 30 November 1989, they had seen a woman in a nightgown ‘floated’ out of a Manhattan apartment by ‘three ugly but humanlike creatures’, and into a large oval craft hovering overhead. The craft turned reddish orange, then flew away and plunged into the river near Brooklyn Bridge.

  Hopkins was delighted—this looked like undeniable evidence for Linda’s abduction, the positive proof that Earth was being invaded by aliens. Two weeks later, Richard and Dan called on Linda Cortile. She liked Richard, but Dan struck her as unfriendly and ‘freaked out’. (Apparently the sight of the abduction had preyed on his mind.) Subsequently, Dan also wrote to Hopkins with his version of what had happened.

  Now Hopkins learnt that Richard and Dan were not ordinary policemen, but the bodyguards of an important political figure. (The name that eventually emerged was Perez de Cuellar, former secretary of the United Nations.) He had also witnessed Linda’s abduction from their car, which had broken down under Brooklyn Bridge.

  The notion that an eminent politician had witnessed the abduction seemed wonderful—final proof not only of this abduction but of the abduction phenomenon in general. And soon Hopkins was even more delighted when a woman wrote to him saying she had also seen the abduction; at 3:30 in the morning, her car had been one of many that had stalled on Brooklyn Bridge; the streetlights had also gone out.

  This was as much as Hopkins described at the conference at MIT. But, in his book Witnessed, it becomes clear that the story developed complications that make the reader wonder if he is having his leg pulled, or has gone mad.

  First, Richard and Dan abducted Linda off the street to ask her if this was all some kind of trick, and insisted on looking at her feet to see if she was an alien. (Through binoculars they had noted that the aliens had no toes.) Then Dan took a holiday to get over the shock. Later, he wrote to Hopkins, disclosing more information about the night of 30 November 1989. Immediately after the abduction, he said, they had found themselves—inexplicably—on the seashore. And there on the sand was Linda, helping the ‘greys’ dig with shovels and putting their finds in rectangular boxes; she was talking to them in their own language. Then Linda and the aliens crossed over to the policemen and their distinguished charge, and held up a dead fish, saying, ‘Look what you’ve done’. When Dan asked who she was, an alien replied, ‘The lady of the sands’.